3.5 cm - 4 cm

We are in the Season of the Weihnachtsmarkt....and our town - like most others - has it's own little Markt. In which, our Church has a booth -- and I decided MONTHS ago that this would be the perfect thing for me to support. :-)

I can bake! I can knit!

Little did I understand that there are very specific guidelines about what makes a good Christmas Cookie, (or what is acceptable as a knitted piece....socks, apparently, are the "big seller" -- aaarrrggghhh -- socks take FOREVER to knit! )

There is no positive reason to dwell on the HIGHLY specific details, but I will toss just this one out:

All cookies should be between 3.5 and 4 cm.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself that sounds reasonable. Let me tell you that a PENCIL is wider than .5 cm. And I would be LYING if I told you that I didn't want to make fun of this. I really, really wanted to make fun of this.... :-).....and.... I sort of did with a couple of people.

But, then I realized: if cookies are to be sold, all festively mixed, in 250 gram bags -- then it is MOST efficient to have them all roughly the same size so that the bags are equal. I guess. It makes sense when I look at it from that perspective.

If I ever do this again, I will make a recipe that uses a cookie cutter and all my cookies will be perfectly shaped and beautiful. The SNICKERDOODLE is not the ideal cookie for maintaining a consistent shape ;-) ....while it is perfectly American, ideal for packing into a cellophane bag (and also -- importantly -- mixes well with the existing German Cookies).... the Snickerdoodle was tricky to tame into that 3.5-4 cm range.

It took me awhile to figure out how to get this Golden Measure -- and I was regretting having ever committed to this ridiculous project -- but then, I found the key was cutting the NORMAL ball of dough into quarters and re-rolling each one into a marble of dough. A small marble, that is.

I can now say that I have MEASURED my baked cookies (ha ha!) -- because even with all that precision, about 60 of them came out of the oven well over 4 cm. I have no idea how many went to the tin for the Weihnachtsmarkt....it seemed like 23,000. ;-) I had just over 1.3 kilos of "good ones."

Next week, Eliza's school is having their own stand in a Weihnachtsmarkt in a neighboring town. They are SOOOOOO not getting cookies from me.

;-) I'm doing the sugared almonds off the school's recipe. No fail.